Spring Integration offers a number of configuration options. Which option you choose depends upon your particular needs and at what level you prefer to work. As with the Spring framework in general, you can mix and match the various techniques to suit the problem at hand. For example, you can choose the XSD-based namespace for the majority of configuration and combine it with a handful of objects that you configure with annotations. As much as possible, the two provide consistent naming. The XML elements defined by the XSD schema match the names of the annotations, and the attributes of those XML elements match the names of annotation properties. You can also use the API directly, but we expect most developers to choose one of the higher-level options or a combination of the namespace-based and annotation-driven configuration.spring-doc.cn